Spring Boot Blogen

"Blogen" is a fictional, micro-blog/message-board website powered by SpringBoot, H2 database, and thymeleaf.

It allows users to post their thoughts on a variety of topics (called categories in Blogen), such as Technology, Web Development, Health, etc...

Each post can also (optionally) have an image attached to it, which will get displayed on the front page of Blogen. Users can create new posts, reply to others' posts, plus edit and/or delete existing posts they have created. Additionally, users can also perform filtering operations on posts, as well as search posts for a specific textual string.

A variety of Spring projects have been used, mainly: spring-data-jpa, spring-mvc, spring-test, plus many more. Unit Tests and Integration tests have also been written using Junit and Mockito. A REST Api has also been developed that will let you perform CRUD operations on Users, Posts, and Categories.

Running

• You will need to have Java 11 installed on your system (JDK or JRE) and have the JAVA_HOME environment variable set
• Clone the springboot-blogen repository
• cd into the main project directory and use maven wrapper to run:
  1. ./mvnw clean install (on Windows systems run mvnw.cmd clean install)
  2. ./mvnw spring-boot:run (on Windows systems run mvnw.cmd spring-boot:run)
  3. open your web browser to http://localhost:8080
  4. The main blogen home page should display (it will attempt to load images from the lorempixel website, which is slow)

Using Blogen

From the Blogen main page, use the Login link (on the upper right) to log into Blogen (see Blogen Users below).

Once logged in you will be taken to the user posts page. This page presents a list of the most recent posts made and allows you to create a new post, reply to a post, edit an existing post, or delete a post. Note that users can only edit or delete posts they have made. Admins can edit or delete any post. Also note that for purposes of simplicity, replying to a post only goes one level deep, in other words, you cannot reply to a reply.

Admin user

In addition to the regular functionality provided above, admin users can create new categories. The link to create new categories will appear on the top navbar if you are logged in as the admin.

Blogen Users

There are four sample users plus one administrator provided out of the gate:

• username: johndoe password: password
• username: scotsman password: password
• username: mgill password: password
• username: lizreed password: password
• username: admin password: adminpassword

Each user has a public facing "home" page that lets you see all the posts they have made. These pages are not protected by Spring Security and can be reached at http://localhost:8080/users/{username} where {username} is the Blogen user-name e.g. mgill

REST Api

There is also a REST Api included with the project. The api been documented with OpenAPI (Swagger). Once you have started the project, the docs are available here: http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui.html#/ The swagger page is secured you will need to use one of the blogen user ids and passwords from above to access it.

Software Used in the Project

• Spring Boot (2.6.3)
• Spring MVC
• Spring Data JPA
• H2 Database
• Project Lombok
• MapStruct
• Hibernate (as the JPA provider)
• Spring Security
• Thymeleaf (for the view layer)
• H2 embedded database
• JUnit5
• Mockito
• CircleCI to run integration tests
• Codecov.io to provide code coverage reports
• Bootstrap 4 (for the front-end web pages)